XDA News Articles

Reports indicate that Microsoft is investing in the rogue Android forker Cyanogen. The funding round is said to be upwards of $70 million, and could allow for a cooperation between Cyanogen and the Silicon Valley giant in the ongoing battle of mobile operating systems. This could be a strategic movement in coordination with other investors given Cyanogen's expression of rebellion against Google's tightening control over Android, as the custom ROM maker has recently spoken out against the "tyranny" of Google in regards...

The Project Ara developer conference 2 began today at Google Plex in Mountain View, San Francisco. It consisted on a series of keynotes to denote the plans for Project Ara to both developers and interested consumers. Google shared details about the roadmap of Ara, which we’ll cover here, and the more developer-focused details about the newer Ara development kits and inner-workings, as well as business information to get module developers up to speed on what to expect from their new...

Users from outside of the United States and Europe have reported their features outright disabled with the latest update to the Google App (formerly known as Google Search). The countries that seem to suffer from this functionality black out seem to be those in Latin America and other spanish-speaking countries. A PSA was posted on the Android Wear subreddit claiming that all of the consumer-based Google Now cards have been disabled. The user resides in the Cayman Islands, located just south of Cuba....

Gmail isn't the only Email client that Google has in its arsenal. A few months ago, the Inbox project was launched, and since then Google developers have been working hard on feature implementation. Inbox by Gmail is a totally new approach to Email, aiming to be more user-friendly and powerful than regular Gmail service. Three of the people who created Inbox took part in Reddit AMA session, in which they answered questions regarding features, requests and overall future of...

In the last few weeks, numerous devices received Lollipop updates both in official and unofficial capacity. Despite its popularity here on XDA, Lollipop is still a very new operating system and OEMs need some time to port it to their devices. As we typically see at the start of every month, Google has released their latest Android platform statistics showing OS and hardware fragmentation on the platform. Last month, we saw Android 2.x (Gingerbread and Froyo) finally fall under 10% install...

As is the case at the start of every month, Google has once again updated its Android Developer Dashboard website with the latest Android Platform Distribution Stats. These numbers show the degree of platform fragmentation and few other interesting things that can be very useful especially for developers looking to better target their applications' UI and required API level. This month is a pretty significant one for Android 4.x KitKat. For the first time in its lifetime, the OS revision...

Not too long ago, Google launched an invite-only beta program for its new Email client, Inbox by Gmail. This new service has already gotten to be quite popular in just a few weeks, and many of us are seeing a stream of invitation requests on our G+ and Facebook news feeds. And now that users are routinely receiving three invites every few days, the community is ever expanding. After a week of extensive testing, Google decided that it's time to tweak its...

Sony Extends its AOSP Project to include the Xperia Z3! That and much more news is covered by Jordan when he reviews all the important stories from this weekend. Included in this weekend's news is the announcement of a small wearable based update to Google Play and be sure the check out the article talking about Google allowing searches to interact with apps! That's not all that's covered in today's video! Jordan talks about the other videos released this weekend...

Android 5.0 Lollipop brings lots of new features that are quite useful for end users and developers. In the interview with Google execs we talked about earlier, they talked about making integration with Ok Google a bit easier. As promised, Google has now provided a method to use the search with external applications. The solution comes in just six lines of code that can be added to the AndroidManifest.xml file in your app. After adding it, users will be able to...

Google is now officially no longer the owner of American phone manufacturer Motorola. Earlier today, the $2.91 billion deal finally took place, and now the American company is officially owned by Chinese giant Lenovo. The deal has been confirmed by executives of both parties. This means that Lenovo has full rights to Motorola's product portfolio and acquires all technologies owned by this OEM. Motorola's headquarters are set to remain in Chicago. Lenovo will also keep its newly integrated employees working on their existing...

While we haven't really had much in the way of consistent "Google Update Wednesdays" in the past few months, Google sure knows how to get back in the groove of things when they want to. Throughout the day yesterday, Google unleashed a massive wave of updates to a good deal of its first party Android apps, including Google Play Games, Wallet, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Google+, and Camera. So what's new in all of these Google updates and how can you...

Without a doubts, Google has essentially become somewhat of a spy, as the Mountain View company seemingly wants to know what you are doing at any given moment. To help us all stay in (relatively decent) shape, Google announced Android Fit, a basic activity tracker that tells you how many steps you have taken, miles cycled, and so on. Android Wear, which was formally announced at Google I/O, promised to bring full Fit support with Lollipop. Just a few hours...

Recently, Google+ exploded with the announcement of Google Inbox, as revolutionary new way to handle your email. Google is trying to revolutionize the way you deal with email, with features like Snooze for an email, quick reminders and automatic sorting into categories. In this video XDA TV Producer TK reviews Google Inbox. TK shows off the application, its uses, functionality and talks about his thoughts of the application. If you want a more in depth review check out TK’s videos on...

To kick off the great presentations at this years Big Android BBQ Googlers Reto Meier, Timothy Jordan and Chet Haase talk about Android's progression from the beginning to now the time of Android's version 5 release Lollipop - oddly timed to match the fifth Big Android BBQ. The talk starts with a discussion of Android over the years and the drive to keep innovating. With speakers like Reto Meier, a manager of Google's Scalable Developer Advocacy team, and Timothy Jordan,...

While most of us are super excited about the Android Lollipop and the new Nexus devices, a few of you might have noticed that Google issued a major update to its Androidify app. This small, yet cool application allows you to create funny avatars that are used by many XDA members such as Senior Recognized Developer XpLoDWilD. With this latest update, Androidify has become quite a different application. There are a sheer number of sharing tools that can be used to...

This past week has certainly been a good one for Google fans. In the span of the last seven days, we've seen updates to Chrome Stable, Hangouts for Chrome We even got to see a screenshot showing the Material Design-laden future of Google Now. Now, we've got yet another update to share, and this time it's to the Chrome Beta channel. Coming in at version 39.0.2171.25, Chrome Beta 39 brings many new feature additions that one would expect from a major version...

A little under a month ago, we wrote about how Google Play Services had begun receiving a version bump to 6.1. Chief among the enhancements brought forth by the new version are added e-commerce analytics support through Google Tag Manager and improved APIs for Google Fit and Google Drive, including a new Material Design compliant file picker for the latter. With this update's improved tag support, developers were then able to better understand how various user acquisition campaigns perform at...

This past week and a half has sure been busy for first party Google Android application updates. Just a little over a week ago, we started off with a Google Play Newsstand update that brought a complete Material Design makeover. Then just one day later, Google followed up with a Google+ update that brought some additional Material Design goodness to the first application to sport the UI style in the first place. Then two days ago, we were given updates to the...

Hangouts is an application that needs no introduction. Google's instant messenger and texting app is perhaps the most popular way to communicate on Android. Just a few hours ago, the desktop client of Hangouts received a major overhaul that changed practically everything we have seen in the app thus far. The new version of Hangouts introduces a concept similar to chat heads on Facebook for Android. Conversations with certain people or groups can be moved freely on the screen. This looks incredibly...

Over the past several months, we've seen quite a few Google applications receive a Material Design makeover. This new UI paradigm first began showing its head far before its official unveiling alongside Android L in June of this year, starting with the Google+ application. Since then, we've seen several other Google apps such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides receive Material Design makeovers. And in this past week, we even saw Material Design updates to Chrome Stable and Google+. What's one extremely prominent Google...

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